Abandoned

The morning hung out in the sun for the dew of the night to melt. And the memories of darkness, disinfected by the light of a new day. You turn around, murmuring in your half-asleep state of mind. The unruly mass of hair that you often play with flows away from my grasp as you turn towards me.

I kiss your forehead. You move your neck upwards. I plant one on your left eye. Your eyebrows bristle over my lips. I wonder what you would say about my personal hygiene as I lie there smelling of yesterday’s dinner. I smile as I imagine you shaking your head exasperated at what you call my “caveman approach to hygiene”. I see, in my mind’s eye, your nose scrunching as you refuse to believe that a modern man wears the same, unwashed jeans for three months. I thank my stars for not bringing my non-existent cleanliness to your notice and chasing you away from me. I kiss your unscrunched nose.

You cuddle closer to me. The sun peers through the window to catch a sight. I hug you, hiding you away and claiming you for myself. I raise an arm to shoo him away. You move painfully close, for me to let my thoughts stray. 

The sun lights your brown hair golden. Poorer is the man whose wealth rots in metal safes, for his dream carpets aren’t woven with live strands of gold. I let those strands fall on your face to see how they hug your smile. I probably imagined it, but I hear you murmur the name of a place we once were at. A lively, joyous place, where no sun woke anyone up and people knew how to live. Away from the busy chaos where the dead moved so brisk, we lived a lifetime there, unperturbed by the torturous rigor of the clock and the calendar.

Another day, another world. Early morning hours. The maiden of night was reluctantly wrapping the folds of her shroud together. We lay there, folded into each other, with no time for the sun. As his scorching glare penetrated us, we moved on, to shadier places. A hideous shack, where we’d talk all day long, you said. So scary looking that nobody dares disturb us, you said. It had been a railway maintenance men’s waiting room. The railway authorities had been frank in pointing out that it was no longer in use.

“Abandoned”, it was written on all four walls, on the outside. Dark, stern lines of black soot, written using the coal they used for the steam engines, I said. 
“You know so much, so, so much about things that are obvious. How do you do it?” you said, kissing me.

“Well, considering what I get for pointing it out, you know…” I said, kissing you back.
And then we spoke. About a million things. Life, youth, the railways, the telegraph lines, the dirty window glass, a kite flying in the distance, steam engine coal, steamy sex, old age and a house. You wanted to settle down right there. “Paint it blue all over and write “Occupied” on all four walls, inside and outside” you said.

“That way, from a distance, a passerby on his long journey won’t know where the grass ends and the sky starts and we’ll live here forever” you said.

“But won’t that offend the Gods?”

“Ya, it might. But who cares? We’ll paint the roof green. Looking from above, they won’t know which is grass and which is home.” 

And that convinced me. 

And so, in this house where I die, I paint the roof blue and the walls green. So they all know where to come to take me away. Where I lie, breathing fully, without your comforting, secure arm across my chest, living a toxic existence.

As the sun withdraws into the clouds, he furls the images away with him, of the shack, of the telegraph lines, of the kite flying in the distance and of you. All that remains is the warmth on the mattress where you lay. Ya, that and the word “Abandoned” written with the indelible ink of memory, all along the walls.

On Lectures and Questions

Disclaimer : All characters and events mentioned in this post, even those based on real people, are entirely fictional. Any similarity to people, living, dead, or somewhere in between, is purely fictional and shall be considered to be the product of the fertile imagination of the reader. 


It is not every day that one of the participants in a lecture, preferably sitting on the side of the audience, comes up with a question. Not in our class, no. The lecturers try, usually with all the brutality of a Mafia henchman extracting a confession, to get a question out of us. Unfortunately for them, our Omerta runs deeper than the usual wuss you’d see in a gangster flick. But that doesn’t stop the lecturers from trying. And no one really knows why.
One of them has confessed to this writer on an informal occasion that it gives them a sense of fulfilment. The questions, not the aforementioned informal occasion. To this end, they try during a long and arduous lecture, pausing and looking at us in a curious fashion, as though expecting a challenge. When nothing of the kind jumps up, they have a sense of disappointment wrought on their faces, as though their efforts had gone in vain. Then comes the usual, clichéd line that must have been first used by Sage Vasishta to Dasaratha’s clan when he implored them for a question and was not offered any. “If there are no questions, it can only mean one of two things: you’ve either understood everything or nothing.” This followed by a derisive snigger. Making such statements, providing only the most extreme of possibilities to a class of the most moderate and the most forgiving of students, appears to this writer to be an attempt to provoke the err… sleeping demons within them. 
In all fairness to us participants, it’s not that we haven’t been listening to the lecture or do not have any questions to ask. Not quite. But one hardly expects the brain to come up with a question, when it’s tirelessly using all of its energy in telekinetically moving the minute hand of the clock closer to lunch time. 
But we digress. The primal evil present in a lecturer, in fact one presumes that every lecturer after accepting his job goes around shopping for books titled “Torture for Dummies” and the like, rises to the surface at the end of a lecture. After quite monotonously telling us about the importance of having Free Trade, with Jupiter, or some such faraway place, they pause, leading the most focussed of minds to wonder what it had missed. This act has disturbed the meditative silence that characterises our class most of the time, and would have led to a stray curse turning the lecturer into a stone or microphone or such rhyming objects if it weren’t for the kindness of the students. 
The bewildered students, caught in the middle of their path to enlightenment, often look lost and confused. They look at each other, not unlike a brood of chicken walking into the hungry housecat, to find out why there is a pause in what was until then, monsoon rain on a tin roof. 
These existential dilemmas have resulted in closer cooperation among the aforementioned chicken brood, whereby a rotation scheme has been devised. It has been decided that henceforth there shall be a designated questioner, a doubting Thomas, who shall sit in the closed confines of his room, scrape the bottom of his brain and come up with a question to be asked in class the next day. An amendment to this rule was proposed to ensure that this question was inclusive enough to include the subject matter of the day’s discussion in the subject matter of the question. This was met with almost unanimous approval. A list was prepared in the alphabetical order of the first names (Adam Zachary wanted last names to decide the order, but was categorically silenced), so that everyone who scrapes his brain shall get enough days of rest for the scrape to heal and be scraped again. 
I’d like to tell you about the one time when one of my questions shocked the lecturer into jumping on the table, but I think I’m confusing my lecturer and Tom Cruise. After all, it was my turn to ask the question today and the scrape is still healing. See you until next time.